Split: A Counterculture Childhood

The daughter of two '60s activists gives voice to her generation.

By Lisa Michaels

Houghton Mifflin, 307 pages, $23

Reviewed by:

Amanda Klonsky

Amanda is majoring in documentary studies at the University of Wisconsin.

She is the daughter of Mike Klonsky, my old roommater and past President of Students For A Democratic Society (SDS). ED.

The word "split" carries weighty connotations for me. "The Split" is how my parents, political activists in the 1960s, refer to a major turning point in their lives-the end of the biggest radical student organization of the time, Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, of which my father was the national secretary. In 1968, SDS splintered into a number of factions, and my parents started a group called the Revolutionary Youth Movement II.

Lisa Michaels' new book, "Split," is a memoir of her childhood as her parents grappled with the personal and political upheaval of the time. I was amazed to see that a memoir had been written by a woman the age of my older sister, who is not yet 30. I wondered how Michaels could have enough perspective to address both her parents' dramatic lives and her own.

When SDS split, Michaels' father joined the Weather Underground. Its members believed, as Michaels describes it, "that a revolution was imminent, but that it required a spark, some kind of violent action, to catalyze a mass uprising." Her parents had just separated, and soon after her father became a Weatherman he abandoned Michaels and her mother, though he continued to live in the same town. Michaels recounts the struggles between her parents in the same brutally vivid way she tells all her stories in "Split": with images that are sharp but, at the same time, seem worn from retelling and debating.

Soon after Michaels' father joined the Weathermen, Michaels' mother went down to the group's headquarters and confronted him, furious. "My mother says she pounded on the door until they let her in," writes Michaels. "My father's comrades were gathered round, and in front of them she said her piece. What about the model childcare arrangement? What about his responsibilities? He told her that he had bigger responsibilities and urged her to leave me with Grandma Kate and join him in the struggle. She remembers looking at my father then and feeling that she barely knew him. "I can't believe you would give up your own kid," she said. And in her memory, he replied with a line that would haunt her in the years to come: I was no more his child than were all the children in Vietnam."

This passage upset me a great deal; it raises questions I've long had about the relationship between child-rearing and political activism. I remember hearing that in SDS, a woman my parents knew had been pressured by her friends to have an abortion. "How can you be a revolutionary and a mother at the same time?" they would ask her. I have other friends who are my age who have believed that their parents put politics before their families in subtler ways. What is inspirational in Michaels' writing is the way she and her father eventually were able to move beyond their original tumult, creating a family with their own values; a new kind of family for the new society they were trying to build.

After Michaels' father spent time in prison for his part in an anti-war protest, he tried to start over with her. Michaels spends a good deal of the rest of the story recounting their struggle to mend their relationship. They were building a new kind of family; with the '60s came new ideas about egalitarian parenting and alternative family structures. Eventually, both of Michaels' parents found new partners and had other children, while also continuing in their personal attempts to change society. But through it all Michaels was taken care of by people who loved her, and as an adult she can articulate her feelings about her family beautifully. Some will read this book and look for evidence that the '60s generation destroyed the American family. I don't believe they will find any; the '60s and radical culture didn't mean abandoning kids.

Much of Michaels' narrative of life with her father reminded me of my own childhood. Some of my earliest memories are of racing my mother down bungalow-lined blocks to see who could stuff the most mailboxes with Harold Washington's mayoral campaign literature the fastest. Intense discussions about racism and women's equality marked the day-to-day discourse in my family as well. But those kinds of details form just the backdrop in Michaels' piece.

As much as it is a story about having radical parents, this is a story of coming of age in America in the post-Baby Boom years, a story of divorce, of Easters and summers with one family and Christmases and school years with another.

Michaels inspects her childhood in a surprisingly balanced manner, looking back even at the most terrible moments and struggling to understand them. She is not whiny or self-indulgent.

This is an adventure story, a tale about living in a mail truck with her mother and stepfather for years, roaming the Southwest until they found a small plot of land on which to live; about being raised in a hippie family in a small town and being made fun of for having funny clothes and messy hair. In young adulthood, she journeys from UCLA to India, where she treks alone across snow-packed mountains and, after nearly freezing to death, makes some sense of herself and of her past.

Whether or not she intended to, Michaels has given voice to a generation that has gone without a spokesman. If there were, as my father claims, 100,000 members of SDS in 1968, then I'd guess there must be at least 1 million young people whose parents were in some way involved in the student movement or the counterculture of the '60s. Many of us are nearing the time when we might have children ourselves. How will we do? One thing is for sure: For those of us who have had adventures like Lisa Michaels, we will have some great bedtime stories to tell.